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American Literature1830–1865

e have listened too long to the courtly muses of Eu-rope,” Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed in “The AmericanScholar,” an address he delivered at Harvard College in 1837.

Emerson developed an old and familiar theme, calling on writers to asserttheir literary independence from Europe, just as more than sixty years ear-lier Americans had declared their political independence from England.For him, the challenge remained what it had been since the Revolution:American writers needed to develop new literary forms and modes ofexpression in response to the democratic institutions, material realities,and social dynamics of life in the United States. Despite the earlier effortsof revered authors like William Cullen Bryant and Washington Irving,many critics shared Emerson’s belief that American writers had not yetcreated a truly indigenous or “native” literature. At the opening of “Ameri-can Literature,” an essay published in 1846, Emerson’s friend MargaretFuller thus observed:

Some thinkers may object to this essay, that we are about to write of thatwhich has, as yet, no existence. For it does not follow because many booksare written by persons born in America that there exists here an Americanliterature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europedo not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an originalidea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into lifefresh thoughts along its shores.

As difficult as it was to recognize in 1846, however, a distinctly Ameri-can literature had already begun to emerge. Although nagging questionsremained about what constituted a native literature, some major workspublished during the previous decade illustrated the variety and increas-ing vitality of American writing. Those works also illustrated the ways in

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George Caleb Bingham, Stump Speaking (1853–54)

Bingham, a professional painter widely known for his depictions of people andfrontier life in Missouri, was also an active politician. In Stump Speaking, one ofthe paintings collectively known as his “election series,” he portrayed a distinc-tive part of American electioneering, the “stump speech,” so called because polit-ical candidates in frontier areas frequently stood upon the stumps of trees toaddress voters. Here, the speech is delivered from a makeshift platform by apolitician gesturing to the crowd of men while some boys play in the foreground.In the antebellum period, the electoral franchise was extended to nearly all adultwhite males, who dominated the political process in the United States. But thevalue placed upon oratory and the numerous reform societies that sprang up dur-ing the period offered an opportunity for women, African Americans, and mem-bers of other minority groups to speak out publicly on a wide range of politicaland social issues during the turbulent decades before the Civil War.

“W

which European Romanticism, which exerted such a powerful force onAmerican writers, was adapted by them to their own ends and purposes.The natural world, a major focus of many Romantic writers, took on a spe-cial, spiritual significance in Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836). He alsoextended the Romantic emphasis on the importance of the individual todemocratic, egalitarian ends in “Self-Reliance” and other essays in whatmany readers view as his two most important books, Essays (1841) andEssays: Second Series (1844). The radical and revolutionary implications

INTRODUCTION 589

COMPARATIVE TIMELINE, 1830–1865

Dates American Literature History and Politics Developments in Culture,Science, and Technology

1830–1839 1830 Second edition of DavidWalker’s Appeal (1829)

1831 Poe, Poems

1833 Apess, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the WhiteMan”

1833 Child, Appeal on Behalfof That Class of AmericansCalled Africans

1834 Sigourney, Sketches andPoems

1830 U.S. population:12,866,020

1830 Mormon Church orga-nized and publication of theBook of Mormon

1830 Indian Removal Act allo-cates money to relocate tribesto west of Mississippi River

1830 Revolutions in France,Belgium, Poland

1831 Turner’s slave rebellionin Virginia

1832 Jackson reelected president

1832 Black Hawk War

1833 Abolition of slavery inBritish colonies; AmericanAnti-Slavery Society founded

1828–30 Steam locomotivesdeveloped; 35,000 miles of railroad track laid in theUnited States

1830 Godey’s Lady’s Bookfounded

1831 Garrison founds the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper

1833 Knickerbocker foundedin New York City

1833 First penny-press news-paper, New York Sun, estab-lished

1833 First tax-supported public library (New Hampshire)

1833 Large-scale manufactur-ing of eyeglasses begins

1834 Southern Literary Mes-senger founded

1835 Colt invents revolver

of Romanticism were developed by Margaret Fuller, notably in Woman in

the Nineteenth Century, a groundbreaking feminist analysis published in1845. The Romantic concern for human rights and dignity gained addi-tional resonance in works like the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Doug-

lass (1845), one of the numerous slave narratives that so enriched theliterature of the United States. The nation’s literature also revealed aRomantic emphasis on imagination and individual psychology, as well ason the importance of history and locale, which American writers exploredin a wide range of works. One of the most popular forms was the shortstory, usually called the sketch or tale, which strongly appealed to the

590 AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1830–1865


1836 Emerson, Nature

1836 Holmes, Poems

1837 Hawthorne, Twice-ToldTales

1837 Whittier, Poems Writtenduring the Progress of the Abo-lition Question

1840 Poe, Tales of theGrotesque and Arabesque

1840 Brownson, The LaboringClasses

1841 Catherine Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy

1841 Emerson, Essays

1836 Van Buren elected president

1836 Battle of the Alamo andestablishment of Republic ofTexas

1837 Economic panic, severedownturn in American econ-omy

1837–1901 Victoria becomesqueen of Great Britain

1838–39 “Trail of Tears”:Cherokee forced from theirlands by federal troops

1840 U.S. population:17,069,453

1840 Harrison elected president

1841 First wagon trains travelwest on Oregon Trail

1841 Tyler becomes presidentafter death of Harrison

1837 Invention of steam-driven flatbed press for print-ing books

1837 United States Magazineand Democratic Reviewfounded

1837 Deere patents steel plow

1838 Daguerre developsdaguerreotype photographicprocess

1840 Dial established as journal of the transcendentalists

1841 New-York Tribunefounded by Greeley

1841 Graham’s Lady’s andGentleman’s Magazinefounded

1841 Barnum opens his American Museum in NewYork City

1841 Development of electroplate process in printing

1830–1839(cont.)

1840–1849

growing number of readers in the United States and which American writ-ers brought to a new level of originality and distinction. Indeed, the shortstory was a primary source of the growing force and interest of Americanliterature, as exemplified by such diverse collections as Edgar Allan Poe’sTales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The

Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendents

of the Pilgrims (1843), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837)and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).

The spirit of innovation that characterized many of the works pub-lished by the time Fuller’s essay “American Literature” appeared in 1846

INTRODUCTION 591


1842 Griswold, The Poets andPoetry of America

1843 Smith, The Sinless Childand Other Poems

1844 Emerson, Essays; Sec-ond Series

1845 Poe, The Raven andOther Poems

1845 Fuller, Woman in theNineteenth Century

1845 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of FrederickDouglass

1846 Hawthorne, Mosses froman Old Manse

1849 Thoreau, “Resistance toCivil Government”

1844 Polk elected president

1845–60 Roughly two millionpeople, mostly from northernEurope (especially Ireland),immigrate to the United States

1845 United States annexesTexas, which enters Union asslave state

1846–48 United States wageswar against Mexico; treatycedes entire Southwest toUnited States

1846 United States acquireslarge portion of Oregon Coun-try through treaty with GreatBritain

1847 Brigham Young leadsgroup of Mormons to Utah

1848 Taylor elected president

1848 Revolutions in France,the Austrian Empire, the Ger-man states, and Italian states

1848 First women’s rights con-vention in United States heldin Seneca Falls, New York

1848–49 California gold rush

1842 Dickens’s American tour

1843 Invention of typewriter

1844 Morse invents telegraph

1844 New York Ledgerfounded

1846 Howe invents sewingmachine

1847 North Star founded byDouglass

1848 Marx and Engels, TheCommunist Manifesto

1840–1849(cont.)

was even more apparent in the work of American writers during the follow-ing decade. Herman Melville published his first novel in 1846, and within afew years three of the most celebrated American novels appeared:Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), andStowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52). In various ways, all of those bookspressed against the formal boundaries and accepted subjects of novels.They were followed in short order by other books that challenged both lit-erary and social conventions. One was Henry Thoreau’s Walden (1854), anexperimental prose work that blended elements from a wide range of gen-res, including autobiography, nature writing, social criticism, and utopian



1850 Narrative of SojournerTruth

1850 Hawthorne, The ScarletLetter

1850 Marvel, Reveries of aBachelor

1851 Melville, Moby-Dick

1851 Smith, Woman and HerNeeds

1851–52 Stowe, Uncle Tom’sCabin

1853 Fern, Fern Leaves

1854 Harper, Poems on Mis-cellaneous Subjects

1854 Thoreau, Walden

1855 Longfellow, The Song ofHiawatha

1855 Whitman, Leaves ofGrass

1855 Melville, Benito Cereno

1850 U.S. population:23,191,876

1850 Compromise of 1850admits California to Union as afree state and enacts strictfugitive slave law

1850 Fillmore becomes presi-dent after death of Taylor

1852 Pierce elected president

1854 Kansas-Nebraska Actincorporates doctrine of popu-lar sovereignty to decide issueof slavery; beginning of Repub-lican Party

1850 Harper’s New MonthlyMagazine founded

1850 Jenny Lind, “the SwedishNightingale,” begins Americantour

1851 New York Times isfounded

1851 Powers, The Greek Slave(sculpture)

1853 Putnam’s Monthly Maga-zine founded

1850–1865

tracts. Another was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), which repre-sented a radical and self-conscious attempt to break with traditionalpoetic practices. Certainly he refused to listen to “the courtly muses ofEurope,” whose influence on American writers Emerson had deplored in“The American Scholar.” At about the same time Whitman’s volume waspublished, the equally innovative American poet Emily Dickinson beganher own remarkable career. In fact, so much important writing was pro-duced during the early 1850s that those years have been described as the“American Renaissance,” a term that with almost equal justification maybe applied to the whole period from 1830 through the Civil War.

INTRODUCTION 593


1856 Melville, Piazza Tales

1860–65 Dickinson writes sev-eral hundred poems

1861 Jacobs, Incidents in theLife of a Slave Girl

1861 Cooke, Poems

1861 Davis, Life in the Iron-Mills

1862 Stoddard, TheMorgesons

1863 Alcott, HospitalSketches

1865 Whitman, Drum-Taps

1856 Civil war breaks outbetween proslavery elementsand free-soil settlers in Kansas

1856 Buchanan electedpresident

1857 Dred Scott decisiondeclares that African Ameri-cans have no constitutionalrights

1857 Economic panic, anothersevere downturn in Americaneconomy

1859 John Brown attempts tolead slave insurrection atHarpers Ferry, Virginia

1860 U.S. population:31,443,321

1860 Lincoln elected presi-dent by carrying all eighteenfree states

1861 Representatives ofsouthern states form Confeder-ate States of America

1861 Confederate troops fireon Fort Sumter in Charlestonharbor, starting Civil War

1863 EmancipationProclamation

1864 Lincoln reelected presi-dent

1865 Lee surrenders at Appo-mattox, ending Civil War; Lincoln assassinated

1856 Bessemer inventsprocess for manufacturingsteel

1857 Atlantic Monthly foundedby Emerson, Longfellow, andothers

1857 Harper’s Weekly, NewYork news and literary maga-zine, founded

1858 First transatlantic tele-graph sent successfully viasubmarine cable

1859 Darwin, Origin ofSpecies

1859 Anglo-African Magazinefounded

1864 Pasteur inventspasteurization

1865 Mendel discoversgenetics

1850–1865(cont.)

Technology, Transportation, and the Growthof the Literary Marketplace

The literary achievements of the period were spurred by a wide range offactors, from intense nationalism to major changes in the book trade inthe United States. “God has predestined, mankind expects, great things

from our race; and great things we feel in our souls,” Melvilleaffirmed in 1850. “We are the pioneers of the world; theadvance-guard sent in through the wilderness of untried things,to break a new path in the New World that is ours.” Such expan-sive and optimistic visions were in part a product of the nation’srapid economic growth. Although there were two severe depres-sions during the boom-and-bust period — in 1837 and again in1857 — the growing prosperity of many Americans generatedenormous self-confidence in themselves and their country. A

major engine of economic growth was technology, as new inventionstransformed both agriculture and industry.

The production of printed materials was also radically altered by newtechnologies, including the introduction of cheap, machine-made paper.The development of mechanical power-presses and the lower costs ofprinting made it possible for an ever-larger percentage of the expandingpopulation to afford books and periodicals. The number of readerssteadily increased as a result of rising literacy rates and the significantgrowth in the number of schools, which were major consumers of books —as many as 40 percent of those published during the period were text-books. Even as reading became an increasingly popular form of entertain-ment at home and during travel, it served as an important means ofinstruction and self-improvement outside the classroom, especially forgroups whose educational opportunities were limited. The first fourwomen to receive college degrees in the United States graduated fromOberlin in 1841, and only a few other colleges were open to women untilafter the Civil War. Economic pressures limited the formal education ofmost working-class Americans, including writers like Melville and Whit-man, both of whom left school to find jobs before they were twelve yearsold. Like many others — including former slaves such as Frederick Doug-lass and Harriet Jacobs, who had been denied any formal education —Melville and Whitman largely educated themselves by reading works theyeither purchased or withdrew from the expanding system of locallibraries, yet another major market for books and periodicals in theUnited States.

The expansion of every part of the literary marketplace encouragedmany aspiring writers to seek to make a career of authorship, somethingonly a handful of American writers had managed to do before 1830.


“We are the pioneers of the

world; the advance-guard

sent in through the wilder-

ness of untried things, to

break a new path in the

New World that is ours.”

Although making a living through authorship was still a precarious pur-suit, many writers were determined to try. By the mid-1830s, NathanielHawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were regularly contributing stories andsketches to magazines, and the growing number of periodicals during thefollowing decade spurred the efforts of other writers. Many of them werewomen, who claimed an increasingly large share of the market for periodi-cal literature. After publishing a textbook in 1833, for example, HarrietBeecher Stowe soon began to write sketches and stories for religiousnewspapers and magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book.

There was also a growing market for books of all kinds, including poetryand increasingly novels. Novels were still viewed with suspicion by manyclerical critics, who worried about the impact of romantic, unrealistic

INTRODUCTION 595

The Power-Press

An illustration from Jacob Abbott’s The Harper Establishment; Or, How the StoryBooks Are Made (1855). At the time, Harper & Brothers was the largest publisherin the United States, printing a million books a year at its plant in New York City.The great pressroom contained nearly thirty power-presses, each attended by ayoung woman, called “the feeder.” Her only job was to place fresh sheets of paperon the inclined surface in front of her, called the “apron” of the press, whichmechanically printed and moved each sheet to the completed stack to her right.The sheets were then gathered, folded, placed in proper order, and stitchedtogether to make a pamphlet or book.

fictions on both individual readers and the morality of the country. Butnovels nonetheless gained increasing popularity during the period, emerg-ing in the 1850s as the best-sellers in the United States. With the aid ofnew methods of production and promotion, such books sold in numbersthat would have been unimaginable only decades earlier. In addition, theabsence of an international copyright law made it possible for Americancompanies to produce cheap reprints of popular British novels withouthaving to pay royalties to the authors. Proudly describing the astonishinggrowth of the book trade in the two decades between 1835 and 1855 — dur-ing which the number of books published in the United States “had ad-vanced ten times as fast as the population” — the publisher George PalmerPutnam triumphantly added: “If we compare the numbers printed of eachedition, the growth is still greater; for, twenty years ago who imagined edi-


Leila T. Bauman, Geese in Flight

As its title suggests, one theme of this naive American painting is natural move-ment, variously illustrated by the galloping horse, the currents of wind and water,and the chevron of migrating geese. But its central story is the development ofhuman modes of transportation, from the pedestrians, carriage, and railroadtrain in the foreground to the skiff, sailing ships, and steamboat in the back-ground. In the painting, the natural and the man made are harmoniously bal-anced. By the time it was painted in the 1850s, however, technological advanceshad already begun radically to transform life in many parts of the United States.

tions of 300,000, or 75,000, or 30,000, or even the now common numberof 10,000?”

The widespread distribution of books and periodicals was made pos-sible by the establishment of a national postal system and a revolution intransportation, which profoundly altered virtually every aspect of life inthe United States. By 1830, steamboats plied all of the major rivers in thecountry, as well as the Great Lakes, and railroad tracks soon began tospread out in a vast network across the nation. From 1828, when the firststeam locomotive was built in America, to 1860, almost 35,000 miles oftrack were laid in the United States. That expanding system made it pos-sible to transport cheaply both people and goods, including printed mate-rial, to even the most distant markets. It consequently led to the emergenceof mass-circulation newspapers like the New-York Tribune, which by the1850s was distributed throughout the country, and the establishment ofmagazines targeted at a national audience, including Putnam’s Monthly

Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly. Both of those magazines featured thework of American writers, though at the time that essentially meant writ-ers from New England and New York. The centers of publishing in Boston,Philadelphia, and increasingly New York City became the major export-ers of literary culture to the rest of the country, which was suppliedwith books, periodicals, and even lecturers from the East. Certainly thetransportation revolution had a direct impact on writers like Emerson,whose extensive lecture tours took him from cities on the East Coast totowns beyond the Mississippi River. As he observed in one of his lectures,Emerson also viewed advances in transportation as a crucial means ofbinding together the vast and increasingly diverse country into a single,unified nation:

Not only is distance annihilated, but when, as now, the locomotive and thesteamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousandvarious threads of national descent and employment and bind them fast inone web, an hourly assimilation goes forward, and there is no danger thatlocal peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved.

Religion, Immigration, and Territorial Expansion

Another force that helped bind the country together was religion. Despitetheological disputes among the proliferating sects of the country, most ofthem could gather together under the broad umbrella of Protestantism.Catholics, who founded Maryland in 1634, and Jews had a long history inthe English colonies that became the United States. But the vast majorityof Americans during the first half of the nineteenth century were Protes-tants. Protestantism was further strengthened by the upsurge of evangeli-cal activity in the decades before the Civil War, a period known as the Second

INTRODUCTION 597

Great Awakening, when widespread revivals led to a tremendous rise inchurch membership and religious sentiment in the United States. Thetrademark of the revivals was evangelical preaching at “camp meetings,”outdoor religious gatherings that frequently drew thousands of people. Butthe Great Awakening was sustained by the printed as well as the spokenword. Evangelicals emphasized the importance of reading the Bible andreligious tracts. Large numbers of Protestant books were published by theAmerican Sunday-School Union and the American Tract Society, whichwere among the largest publishing firms in the United States. Millions ofcopies of their publications were distributed by members of “conversion


The Camp Meeting at Sing Sing, New York

An illustration from Harper’s Weekly of one of the many camp meetings heldthroughout rural America in the decades before the Civil War. At this gathering,which began on Monday and ended on Saturday, three sermons were deliveredeach day: at ten in the morning, two in the afternoon, and six in the evening, after which there were “prayer meetings, experience meetings, and exhortations,until ten at night.” As many as fifty ministers preached at the largest of the campmeetings, some of which attracted congregations of more than twenty thousandpeople.

societies,” individuals or families who passed out tracts in towns andcities, and by traveling booksellers, who carried their religious wares intoeven the remotest rural areas, often to people who otherwise had little orno access to books. Indeed, in both their preaching and publications, theEvangelicals communicated in a language common people could readilyunderstand. The rhetoric, symbolism, and religious themes of much of theliterature of the period also revealed the impact of the Great Awakening,even on writers who questioned or subverted some of the fundamentalbeliefs of their more orthodox readers.

By the middle of the century, however, Protestantism faced growingchallenges from both within and without. Its institutional authority wasundermined by various “come-outers,” religious dissenters and reformerswho seceded from the Protestant churches, as well as by radical abolition-ists, who insisted that the support of slavery within many of thosechurches violated the true spirit of Christianity. In Narrative of the Life of

Frederick Douglass, Douglass concluded with a vigorous critique of “theslaveholding religion of this land,” increasingly dominated by evangelicalsects composed of both slaveholders in the South and those who sharedtheir religious beliefs in the North. Conservative clergymen frequentlyclashed with both abolitionists and supporters of women’s rights, who alsoappealed to the authority of Christ and the New Testament in rejecting thesocial dictates of American Protestantism. The rising tide of immigrationposed a different kind of challenge to the religious practices, social values,and national self-image shaped by the pervasive Protestant culture of theUnited States. Although most of the new immigrants were farmers andskilled laborers from Protestant countries in Europe, the single largestgroup — roughly two million people between 1845 and 1860 — was com-posed of desperately poor Catholic immigrants driven to seek refuge inAmerica by catastrophic crop failures and famine in Ireland.

The surge of immigration helped generate unprecedented urban andindustrial growth. Viewed with distrust by American Protestants, Catholicimmigrants confronted considerable hostility and various forms of dis-crimination. Most of the Irish immigrants were consequently crowdedinto slums in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Many foundwork in the textile mills that had sprouted up in New England cities likeLowell, Massachusetts; still more, along with many other immigrants,moved on to industrial cities like Pittsburgh or the new cities of what wasthen the West. Between 1830 and 1850, for example, the population ofChicago grew from fifty people to more than 100,000. By the eve of theCivil War, there were fifteen cities with populations above 50,000, andmore than a million people lived in the congested metropolis of New YorkCity. Most workers still labored on the land, and many writers of the periodcontinued to focus their attention on nature and rural life, the realmsexplored in works like Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods. But the city

INTRODUCTION 599

The Tract Primer (c. 1848)

As the cover of this reli-gious tract demonstrates,the home was widelyviewed as the primarysetting for the intellec-tual and moral instruc-tion of children, with themother as teacher.

and the contours of urban life were central features in a growing numberof writings, including the journalism of Lydia Maria Child, Fanny Fern,and Margaret Fuller; works of fiction like Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrive-

ner: A Story of Wall Street; and the poetry of Whitman, who was, perhaps,the first genuinely urban poet in the United States. Few viewed the often-grim realities of the new urban and industrial order as unblinkingly asRebecca Harding Davis, whose Life in the Iron-Mills invited Americans to


Five Points

This painting from the 1840s depicts the crowded buildings and the dark, con-gested streets of the Five Points District in lower Manhattan, then one of theworst slums in the United States. Five Points was notorious for crime, gangs,political corruption, poverty, and the ghastly living conditions in its squalid tene-ments. But the working-class neighborhood was also in many ways the birthplaceof multicultural America, a confined urban space shared by large numbers ofAfrican Americans and recent immigrants from Europe, especially the Irish, whopoured into the area during the 1840s and 1850s.

confront realities they often sought to evade: the growing gap betweenwealth and poverty, as well as the appalling living and working conditionsthat many of the recent immigrants faced in the United States.

The nation’s burgeoning population, which grew from under thirteenmillion in 1830 to over thirty-one million in 1860, also generated a grow-ing hunger for land and increasing pressures for territorial expansion.From the time of the first arrival of European settlers, Native Americanshad been forced from their lands and relentlessly driven westward, aprocess that culminated when Congress passed the Indian Removal Actin 1830. The law authorized the exchange of land west of the Mississippifor Indian holdings in the East, especially the rich agricultural landsof the “Five Civilized Tribes” — the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw,and Seminole Indians — in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.Although some writers and reformers protested the brutal policy, the

INTRODUCTION 601

Crossing the Platte on the Oregon Trail

Before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the only overlandroute to the new lands in the West was the Oregon Trail, which generally followedthe Platte River to its headwaters, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and then splitinto trails leading to California or the Oregon Territory. Beginning with what wascalled “the great migration” of 1843, when a wagon train of one thousand settlersset off from Independence, Missouri, half a million people followed the trail,either on foot or in covered wagons. As this 1859 watercolor suggests, Indianattacks were not the major threat to the settlers. They died in far greater numbers —as many as one in ten — from injuries, disease, exhaustion, and malnutrition during the arduous, four- to six-month journey.

forced removal of the Indians was supported by most whiteAmericans.

But Americans were increasingly divided about the exten-sion of slave territory. Over the protests of abolitionists andthe opposition of antislavery politicians, Congress in 1844 ap-proved the annexation of the slave state of Texas, which hadbeen an independent republic since Anglo-American settlershad rebelled against Mexican rule in 1836. Border skirmishesalong the Rio Grande in the spring of 1846 offered a pretext forthe United States to declare war on Mexico. In the treaty that

ended the war in 1848, Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas and ceded avast territory to the United States. Combined with Texas, the new territoryadded more than a million square miles to the national domain; by then, ithad also been greatly expanded by the formal acquisition of a large por-tion of Oregon Country through an 1846 treaty with Great Britain. Even asEuropean immigrants began to flood into eastern cities, thousands ofsettlers joined the great migration described in works like Francis Park-man’s The Oregon Trail (1849), a celebration of the frontier spirit andAmerica’s westward expansion. Within a few short years, the nation hadthus fulfilled what John L. O’Sullivan, the influential editor of the United

States Magazine and Democratic Review, described in 1845 as “our mani-fest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent whichProvidence has given us for the development of the great experiment ofliberty and . . . self-government entrusted to us.”

Sectionalism and the Coming of the Civil War

Ironically, what many Americans viewed as the triumphant fulfillmentof their “manifest destiny” — a phrase newspapers picked up and madefamiliar throughout the United States — helped sow the seeds of the CivilWar. The need to organize the territories gained from Mexico, which wasmade all the more pressing by the massive increase in westward migrationtriggered by the discovery of gold in California, once again raised theissue of the extension of slavery. In an effort to settle the issue once andfor all, Congress forged the Compromise of 1850. Among the key provi-sions of the compromise, which included the admission of California as afree state but made no restriction on slavery in the other new territories,was a far-more-stringent fugitive slave law. Under the revised law, a per-son suspected of being a runaway slave could be arrested without warrantand was denied trial by jury or the right to testify on his or her own behalf,while any person aiding a runaway was subject to a $1,000 fine and sixmonths’ imprisonment. Moreover, special commissioners were author-ized to call upon the aid of all citizens to assist in the capture of run-


“our manifest destiny to over

spread and to possess the

whole of the continent which

Providence has given us for

the development of the great

experiment of liberty and . . .

self-government entrusted

to us.”

aways — in the view of many Northerners, making them complicit in slav-ery, which most had previously viewed as “the peculiar institution” of theSouth. The passage of the law generated widespread protests in the North,where opposition was sometimes violent. Sectional divisions were deep-ened by the passage in 1854 of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which incorpo-rated the doctrine of “squatter” or “popular sovereignty” — that is, theright of the people of the territories to decide whether slavery would beprohibited — in an area where slavery had previously been excluded by theMissouri Compromise of 1820.

INTRODUCTION 603

Voters allowed to decide whetherLto permit slaveryL

Territory left unorganized

Compromise of 1850 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854

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The Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854

In efforts to resolve sectional divisions over the extension of slavery, Congressadopted the Compromise of 1850 and later passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Inthe former, California was admitted to the Union as a free state, while the settlersof the Utah and New Mexico Territories were allowed to vote for or against slav-ery. But the adoption of similar provisions for “popular sovereignty” in theKansas and Nebraska Territories in 1854 sparked a local war between proslaveryand antislavery settlers that deepened sectional divisions and served as a preludeto the Civil War.

The Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act bitterly dividedthe North and South. Certainly many works of the 1850s, frequently citedas one of the richest decades in American literary history, were shadowedby the deep divisions in the United States. That is not to say that all or evenmost of the writings of the period mirrored such divisions. The most popu-lar book published in 1850 was Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor, in whichthe narrator’s main concern is whether he will marry. Many of the otherpopular works published during the decade were novels like SusanWarner’s The Wide, Wide World and Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamp-

lighter, domestic fictions in which larger social and political issues gener-ally played a minor role. But those issues were at least obliquely treatedin two major novels of the period, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter andMelville’s Moby-Dick, both of which broadly concern conflicts and divi-sions within a community — in the former, Puritan New England, thenviewed by many as the first founding of the nation; in the latter, a whaling

ship in which thirty sailors (the same number as there werestates in 1850) are “federated along one keel,” as Melvilledescribes what might well have been interpreted as a symbol ofthe larger political union. More directly, the crisis of 1850 andespecially the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act prompted Har-riet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first block-buster novel published in the United States. In a different way,sectional divisions also shaped the most important volume ofpoetry published during the decade, Leaves of Grass, in whichWhitman at once celebrated the diversity and insisted on the

fundamental unity of the nation. “The United States themselves are essen-tially the greatest poem,” he declared in the preface to the volume. “Here isnot merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.”

Whitman echoed the nationalistic and patriotic sentiments that had sooften been expressed during the quarter century before he published thefirst edition of Leaves of Grass, within a couple of days of July 4, 1855. Bythen, however, that “nation of nations” was well on its way to the Civil War,anticipated by the civil war that broke out between proslavery elementsand free-soil settlers in Kansas in the spring of 1856. One of the antislav-ery heroes that emerged from “bleeding Kansas” was John Brown. Threeyears later, he led an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Vir-ginia, in an effort to generate a slave insurrection that would spreadthroughout the South. Before he was executed, Brown gained widespreadsympathy in the North. That support deeply embittered Southerners andfurther hardened sectional divisions, which were starkly revealed in theelection of 1860. Abraham Lincoln, who ran on a Republican platform call-ing for the exclusion of slavery from all new territories, carried the eigh-teen free states but did not gain a single electoral vote in any of the


“The United States them-

selves are essentially the

greatest poem,” he declared

in the preface to the volume.

“Here is not merely a nation

but a teeming nation of

nations.”

fourteen slave states. Within three months of his election, eleven South-ern states seceded; on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on FortSumter in Charleston Harbor and the war began. The American Renais-sance did not abruptly end with the outbreak of the Civil War. Youngerwriters like Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard publishedstories and novels during the war. It also inspired some of the finestpoems written by Whitman and Dickinson, as well as a remarkable volumeof verse by Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). But theelegiac themes of their poetry, as well as the muted tone and realisticdetails of much of the other work written during the years 1861–65,marked a significant shift in both the national mood and the conscious-ness of writers seeking to come to terms with the devastating toll exactedby the Civil War.

INTRODUCTION 605

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